{"id":203023,"date":"2025-01-03T10:26:00","date_gmt":"2025-01-03T16:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/01\/mitochondrial-dna-plays-an-underappreciated-role-in-leukemia-development"},"modified":"2025-01-03T10:26:00","modified_gmt":"2025-01-03T16:26:00","slug":"mitochondrial-dna-plays-an-underappreciated-role-in-leukemia-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/01\/mitochondrial-dna-plays-an-underappreciated-role-in-leukemia-development","title":{"rendered":"Mitochondrial DNA plays an underappreciated role in leukemia development"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/mitochondrial-dna-plays-an-underappreciated-role-in-leukemia-development2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Mitochondria are vital to energy production in cells and so play a key role in fueling cancer growth. However, how mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) contributes to cancer has been unclear.<\/p>\n<p>Scientists at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital studied varying levels of mutated mtDNA to see their effect on <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/leukemia+cells\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">leukemia cells<\/a>. They found that while cancer growth was blocked in cells in which all mitochondria contained mutated mtDNA, it was notably increased in cells with moderate amounts of mutated mtDNA. By amplifying an enzyme vital to energy production, the researchers were also able to restart cancer growth in <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/leukemia\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">leukemia<\/a> cells with fully mutated mtDNA.<\/p>\n<p>Collectively, these findings highlight an unexplored connection between mitochondrial DNA and cancer cells\u2019 metabolic function. The findings were <a href=\"https:\/\/www.science.org\/doi\/10.1126\/sciadv.ads8489\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> Jan. 1 in Science Advances.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mitochondria are vital to energy production in cells and so play a key role in fueling cancer growth. However, how mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) contributes to cancer has been unclear. Scientists at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital studied varying levels of mutated mtDNA to see their effect on leukemia cells. They found that while cancer growth [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-203023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203023\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}